When I was sketching the environment in which my character gets lost, I had a vague and at the same time specific idea of how the set would have looked like. Ossie suggested me to make it quite big, to have a feeling of watching a life-size puppet wandering in an enorumous space. I didn’t have a real plan on how to make this set work for me and the puppet animation; I just started working with basic wood panels, keeping my process open to changes and my set quite a fluid, ever-changing environment. The only thing I knew at this stage was that I needed to hang pieces of canvas from above, so I had to create a web of strings and wires that could also move according to my needs. I decided to make 4 different, detached panels in order to move around the set more easily and recreate different spaces each scene, to enhance the sense of disorientation.
I pierced few holes in the panels to glue some sticks that would allow me to create higher structures for hanging the canvas. Later on, I realised I could have glued more sticks to make the structures more complex, but I managed to work around what I had already. I started with simple paper, cardboard and tape structures, to make a base for the papier mache. My process was quite spontaneuous and not really planned,so the forms and shapes would have looked organic and natural. I built each part following my instinct, and at the same time trying to foresee the kind of scenes I could have shot through those gaps/dents, allowing space for the character to move around. One thing I didn’t really thought through was the kind of floor my character would have walked on. Covering the wood in paper, I made the surface quite unstable and uneven for the character to be pinned or blue-tacked to the floor. Being aware of this, I knew I would have had to rely a lot on the rig for making my character stand.
It has been a fun and pleaseant process. I was working quite quickly to meet deadlines but also because I enjoyed spending a lot of time on it. For the papier mache, I followed a basic tutorial on YouTube that suggested to use flour, water and salt to create a solution to dip kitchen paper in. After drying overnight, it became rock-hard. It worked so well that I covered my entire set with it, being a cheap alternative solution to PVA glue. I used 7 kitchen rolls for the entire set.
After each part was finished, it was time to paint the whole thing. I chose a mix of dark acrylics, to create a dark gray that would make the shapes of the environment stand out against the pitch black. It gained a whole different look after I painted it.
The next step was creating the web of canvas and wires. I allowed it to be an intuitive process, to maintain the natural look of the environment; but I also placed the fabric to create the right kind of space I needed for certain scenes, e.g. a big arch covered in canvas to allow the shadow of the father to be seen in its entirety. I also tried to plan where I would have placed the camera and light, so that I could cover certain angles with pieces of canvas to hide them away.
The canvas was all recycled from scraps from the fashion department. I also asked one of the students if I could use their iron boards to get rid of the creases and wrinkles on the canvas after I painted them. I used the key colours dark red and dark green to paint the canvases.
As I was decorating the space, I sticked to the wall some pictures of my dad’s paintings to keep me inspired, and to remind me of the point I started from when I thought of creating this set.
This is a picture from production that shows clearly how I arranged the canvas and how the set was used. Most of the fabric was glued or stitched to the wires or to the structures of my set. The wires were loosely glued to the different poles, so that for each scene I can move them around.
I would mainly make the characater walk on the table (luckily the same colour of my set), not the panels, to enhance stability and stick the feet of my puppet to the ground. I created extra pieces of ground and “boulders”, i.e. plane pieces of cardboard or paper balls covered in papier mache and painted, to have loose pieces of set that could be moved around according to my needs. My grad assists helped me in creating these extras, and they did a great job. I would use these pieces also as “floaters”, as Ossie told me, that is stick them on top of light stands and put them in front of the camera to create shadows or hide the end of the set.
I realised that the creation of the set was an ever-going process; it has grown as I started shooting, to follow my needs and to match with the new ideas that came up as I was filming. For each scene I had to reassemble the set almost from scratch, glueing and unglueing wood boards, wires, stitching new pieces of canvas, painting more fabric, making “fake” canvas out of paper to hide the AutoPoles etc. Ossie also gave me a really useful material, some pitch black foil that helped me during the shooting to create shadows, hide lights and camera, filling gaps.
Animation Process and Promotion 